The Great Indian Novel

The Fifteenth Book: The Act of Free Choice

92

‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you,’ said Draupadi Mokrasi’s adoptive father. ‘Dhritarashtra has left you nothing in his will.’

The girl looked at him with her large, untroubled eyes. She was beautiful now, and though her skin was not of the pale colour prized by upper-class India, she was delicately dusky, with the sun-ripened wheatfields of the Doab glowing in her complexion. Yes, Ganapathi, ours was inevitably a darker democracy, and all the more to be cherished for the Indianness of her colouring. The gleaming darkness of her skin lit up her beauty, so that she shone like a flame on a brass lamp. When she entered a room, everyone in it became a moth, drawn irresistibly to her. Yet her beauty did not intimidate or threaten. Draupadi’s beauty attracted both men and women, both young and old. All sought to be part of her beauty; no man presumed to attempt its submission.

When I saw her, Ganapathi, I wanted the radiance of that flame to spread, to engulf everyone I knew within its warmth. For she was warm, our Draupadi. Hers was not a beauty that held itself aloof; it was not arrogant, nor withdrawn, nor self-obsessed, indeed not even self-sufficient. Other women nurtured their beauty privately, with their secret scents and oils and unguents; Draupadi’s beauty was public, absorbing the beauty of the world around it, blossoming in the sunlight of popular adulation. With her it seemed that in isolation there would be nothing: this was not a beauty that sought confirmation in a mirror; nor was it a light that burned alone, eventually to flicker out untended. No, Ganapathi, Draupadi was like the flame of a brass lamp in a sacred temple of the people. Imagine it: a flame nourished by a ceaseless stream of sanctified oil and the energy of a million voices raised in chanting adoration. A flame at an evening aarti, at the end of the puja, a flame offered to the worshippers as bells tinkle and incense smoke swirls, and a hundred hands reach out to receive its warm benediction; a flame curling and moving towards these hands, glowing ever more brightly as it breathes their reverence. This was the beauty of Draupadi, a beauty that glowed in the open, that drew sustenance from the public gaze. The more people beheld her, the more beautiful she seemed.

This was the extraordinary woman who confronted the reality of her father’s passing. ‘He did so much for me when he was alive; must I expect him to sustain me even after his death?’

‘My child, I have nothing,’ her guardian replied. ‘I gladly took you on for his sake, though God knows it has not always been easy. But now — you are of marriageable age, and what can I do for you? In my community it is not a custom to arrange marriages, and anyway, to whom could I marry off a girl of your uncertain parentage? Draupadi, I simply don’t know what to do.’

‘Don’t worry, Papa,’ Draupadi said, those still, round eyes completely calm. ‘I shall find my own husband.’

It happened sooner than either of them expected.

Those were difficult days for the party. Dhritarashtra had been like the immense banyan tree under whose shadow no other plant could grow. There were a number of us who were leaders of some consequence in different parts of the country, but we had no one of truly national stature to succeed Dhritarashtra — except perhaps for me, and I was already far too old for the job. After long and inconclusive meetings we decided that the Kaurava Party would be run more or less by collective leadership, with the Working Committee effectively in command and the one who was least unacceptable to the others — the honest but limited Shishu Pal — as Prime Minister.

No one was at all certain how it would all work out, or even whether poor decent Shishu Pal would prove up to it. Nor could anyone be entirely sure that Indian democracy itself would not fall into the wrong hands. It had happened elsewhere, notably in neighbouring Kamistan, where a series of shambolic civilian administrations had been overthrown by a military coup.

It was amidst this state of uncertainty that I convened a training and consciousness-raising camp for the youth members of the Kaurava Party. Priya Duryodhani helped me run it. The Pandavas were there; the news of Dhritarashtra’s death had brought them back to Delhi, since Vidur’s reason for keeping them away was gone. Also present at the month-long event was the dark, captivating beauty whose origins only I fully knew, Draupadi Mokrasi.

The camp was a success. I organized, and sometimes gave, lectures on the history and philosophy of the Kaurava Party, the precepts of Gangaji and the contribution of its illustrious leaders from Dhritarashtra and Pandu to Rafi and Shishu Pal. Apart from the plenary sessions under an enormous shamiana, we sat together in smaller, discussion groups, talking about the country’s social and political problems in a more intimate atmosphere, often late into the night. The air those young people breathed was heavy with the warmth of ideas.

It was here that Draupadi Mokrasi met the Pandavas for the first time, and dazzled them, and all the other young men in the camp, with her radiance. For all my advanced years, Ganapathi, I am not insensitive to the impact of young beauty on the rest of my species. But I allowed myself to think that Draupadi’s would be different — until the evening Priya Duryodhani stepped into my room wearing an elegant shawl and an inelegant scowl.

‘You’ve got to do something about this.’ She was direct as usual. ‘The girl is becoming a positive nuisance. None of the boys are listening to anything that’s going on — they have eyes and ears only for Miss Draupadi Mokrasi.’

I didn’t think it was quite that bad, but I shrugged sympathetically. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘You’ve got to get her married,’ she responded bluntly.

She herself had never married, sacrificing nuptial pleasure for service to her father as his official hostess. It was an improbable proposition for her to advance.

I’m afraid I was too taken aback to reply. ‘Married?’ I repeated stupidly.

‘Yes, married.’ Priya Duryodhani’s tone was impatient. ‘It’s the only solution. She has no one to arrange her marriage, it would seem. And you’re practically in loco parentis to all of them here, so there’d be no harm in your trying. Might tame the girl, and bring the boys under control. We can’t have Miss Mokrasi running wild.’

Marriage! Yes, of course, Draupadi had to be married one day. But to tie that boundless spirit to any one man — it would be a crime; it would diminish and confine her, and all of us. It would be like imprisoning the rays of the sun in one room. And who could this exceptionally fortunate man be, who deserved the hand of Draupadi in his? To such a question there could be only one answer — Arjun. To many the pairing would mean wedding perfection to magic; it would unite democracy with the voice of the people. And yet I knew that could not be the whole answer. Arjun might prove worthy of her, but she would not be enough for him. His restless spirit would inevitably move on to other challenges; he would not always be faithful to her. Draupadi could not, should not, be given away to a man who would one day break her heart.

I needed time to think about this. ‘You have raised an interesting question, Duryodhani,’ I acknowledged. And, dare I say it, an important one. I must think about who might be suitable for the girl. Do you have any suggestions?’

‘Certainly.’ Her coal-black eyes seemed to shift away, to a point on the wall behind me. ‘It should obviously be a young member of the Kaurava Party, who is bright, intelligent, well-informed. I can think of only one person who meets these requirements in all respects.’ I sat back, waiting for the obvious name. ‘Ekalavya.’

I tried not to show my surprise. Ekalavya! The boy who had once presumed to call himself a pupil of Drona, and been sent packing by his mentor in an act of dubious ethicality. Of course, I had noticed this repellent youth, with his pencil-line moustache and mocking voice, an intelligent but arrogant young man who had struck me throughout the camp as being far too clever for his own good. And it had been whispered, I knew, that there was hardly a girl at the camp who had been spared one variety or another of his amatory attentions. Why him?

Out of the mists of half-registered memories an image swirled into my mind — an image of Ekalavya emerging from Priya Duryodhani’s room one night; a recollection of his stumbling into me and saying quickly in his cocky voice, ‘I had hoped to borrow a copy of the sayings of Gangaji, but Miss Duryodhani isn’t in her room. May I have yours?’ At the time it had never occurred to me to wonder where Priya Duryodhani could have been at that hour of the night. Now, all of a sudden, it struck me. She had been in her room all along.

So this was how she consoled herself for the opportunities lost in filial devotion to her blind father: and was this the reward she had agreed for Ekalavya’s services?

‘He is bright and able, but suffers unfairly from the handicap of a low-caste birth,’ Priya Duryodhani went on. ‘In our country that means he will never be able to marry a woman worthy of him. Draupadi would be perfect: after all, she has a similar problem. You would be doing them both a favour.’

I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ I said. ‘Then why do you need me? You’ — and I was aware of the cruelty of my words, Ganapathi, but I rubbed them in deliberately — ‘you are old enough to take them both by the hand and arrange it for them.’

She gave me a quick, suspicious look, but my expression had not changed. ‘Who am I?’ Duryodhani asked bitterly. ‘Draupadi would never listen to me. There. . there isn’t the required. . trust between us.’

‘Then this is very selfless of you, Duryodhani,’ I replied. ‘But I am sorry, my answer must be no. I have never myself believed in arranging marriages. Draupadi needs a husband, but she must make her own choice. I will not force it, and’ — I looked directly into those smouldering eyes — ‘neither must you.’

Of what happened thereafter, Ganapathi, and of how it happened, I retain only the most confused of recollections. There was always something mystical about the daughter of Dhritarashtra and his British Vicereine, as if she walked on another plane from the rest of us, and my memory of her act of choice is inextricably entangled with the long and vivid dreams I later began to have about her life and times.

I seem to remember a competition. Yes, definitely: a competition for Draupadi’s hand. Was it at the Kaurava Party camp, or in some bejewelled palace from the depths of mythological memory? I cannot say. I have a vision of a vast canopied hall, filled to overflowing with teeming, cheering multitudes; of nobles and princes assembled in their finery to vie for the hand of our heroine; of Draupadi herself, resplendent in a simple cream sari with a striking red border, her long hair hanging loose to her waist, adorned by a solitary rose. She held a garland of white jasmine in her hands, fragrantly poised to be draped around the neck of the deserving victor.

Then the contest began, and this must have been a dream, for it was a contest unlike any I have ever seen in our land. A large wooden box, slit at the top, sat in the middle of the hall, and everyone in attendance moved forward, in a silent ethereal procession, to drop a folded slip of paper into it. This done, Draupadi approached the box, and I, with the expansive gestures of a magician at a fairground, elaborately placed her inside it, resting serenely on her bed of ballot-papers, white garland at the ready. I closed the lid with a click. Now it was the turn of Draupadi’s suitors, each of whom had to try to open the box. The first to let Draupadi out of it would be garlanded by Miss Mokrasi as her husband.

In the mists of my dream, Ganapathi, a long line of contenders walked forward to claim the hand of Draupadi Mokrasi. There were rich men, men of title, commoners, kings. There were others from my dream: Heaslop in suit and bowler hat, clutching textbooks and commercial contracts; a strange, ugly American in a flowered shirt and Bermuda shorts, with a camera around his neck; a pug-nosed commissar in an astrakhan cap that still dripped the blood of the lambs slaughtered for its manufacture; even a clone of Chakra’s inscrutably sinister Chairman. None of them could open the box. Draupadi sat within, breathing calmly through the slit at the top, betraying no sign of anxiety or expectation. Strong men, weak men, tall men, little men came to take their turn, and shuffled silently away in defeat.

Then Ekalavya strode to the box, but when he placed his fingers upon the clasp, he found his thumb would not move. He backed away in fear and wonder.

A figure from the past, a distant neighbour, emerged. It was Mohammed Ali Karna, his golden skin gleaming; but I barred his way, declaring his ineligibility with outstretched arm and pointing forefinger. He stopped short, his face losing the look of unsmiling confidence that had made him seem like a conqueror at his own coronation. He gave me a bitter grimace of comprehension, but went.

At last it was Arjun’s turn. He rose from the ranks of the throng, and there was a collective gasp at his appearance, physical perfection dressed in simple homespun. Arjun stepped forward with the spring of youth in his step, and placed his hand on the clasp of the box. He looked steadily at me, sensing my anxiety at either result. Then, with no visible effort, he calmly lifted the clasp.

The lid of the box sprang open, and amidst the excited cries of the throng, Draupadi rose within, her graceful sari-clad body glowing like a white flame.

As she bent forward to place the garland around Arjun’s neck, the hall erupted in prolonged cheers; the other Pandavas, watching amongst the crowd, leapt to their feet; and Arjun, the strength and suppleness of his limbs evident in each lithe movement, lifted Draupadi Mokrasi out of her confinement.

In my dream, through a corner of my mind’s eye, I spotted Priya Dury- odhani striding out of the hall. Draupadi’s remarkable swayamvara was over, and I knew, even as I woke from the disorientation of my sleep, that one more of my desiccated grand-daughter’s schemes had misfired.

93

What followed was no dream.

Draupadi Mokrasi had made her act of free choice: and whether it was the way I remembered it, or in some more prosaic encounter at the local coffeehouse or in a late-evening seminar on Modern Indian Institutions, it was as the betrothed of Arjun, and escorted by his four brothers, that she left the training camp.

The first thing the Pandavas did when the camp was over was to telephone their mother. The line was crackling and static-ridden, the kind of connection that makes conversation difficult, shortens tempers and sentences, and restricts communication to essentials. In the hands of Yudhishtir a brief, factual call might still have been possible. But it was, as always, the irrepressible Nakul who insisted on making the call, and who announced to Kunti in his usual fashion: ‘You won’t believe what we’re coming back with! We have a surprise for you, Mother.’

Never would Nakul’s singular choice of the plural prove so momentous. ‘I don’t need anything,’ the matriarch responded across the echoing miles. ‘Share whatever you have brought amongst the five of you — equally.’ ‘What did you say, Mother?’ Share your surprise amongst yourselves.’

Share Draupadi amongst themselves! Imagine the consternation that remark caused, Ganapathi. How could the five ever forget they were committed, by their solemn oath, to obey every injunction of their mother’s, however casual? Throughout the journey home, they discussed and debated, in growing confusion and anxiety, whether their oath could be interpreted to exclude Kunti’s command. Yet for all the outrageousness of it, for all the risk of social disapproval and scandal, the idea of sharing Draupadi entered a corner of their minds and grew to thrilling immediacy.

It was Yudhishtir who first expressed the previously unthinkable.

‘I didn’t ever want to get married,’ the eldest brother said in that solemn way of his, ‘but now I think we shall all have to marry Draupadi, even Bhim who is already married. Otherwise it would be a violation of our sacred oath, and of the precepts of dharma.’

When they returned to confront her with the situation, Kunti seemed distraught at the dilemma into which her unthinking utterance had plunged the family. Arjun’s features were overwhelmed by agonized uncertainty. Only Draupadi remained undisturbed. She stood erect and calm amidst the confusion, unquestioning, untroubled, reading each brother’s mind, seeing through Kunti’s ambivalence. In her self-possessed silence it was apparent that, though she had given her heart to the godlike youth who had won her hand, she realized that democracy’s destiny, and hers, embraced his. brothers too.

‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ Kunti said at last. ‘Nakul, since you started it all, run off and bring Ved Vyas. He’s the only one who can tell us what would be — proper.’

So I came back into the lives of my grandsons. Kunti offered me a cushion on a golden carpet. Before I sat down, the boys all bent to touch my feet. I pushed them away before their fingers got anywhere near my dusty toes: that is one traditional custom with the insincerity and unsanitariness of which I have little patience. The gesture is supposed to symbolize that the bender considers himself as the dust beneath the feet he bends before: if anyone has as little regard for himself as that I don’t want him to touch me at all.

The abortive ritual undergone, Yudhishtir gravely explained the problem.

There’s nothing in the vedas that would sanction one woman marrying several husbands,’ I responded at my most ponderous, ‘but there is certainly a great deal against violating a vow, especially a promise made to a parent. The real question is which would be a worse violation of dharma — breaking your oath to your mother or adopting polyandry. I am inclined to think our traditions would tolerate the second option more easily than the first. There is nothing in any of our ancient texts that extenuates the breaking of a promise — I can’t even think of anyone, however villainous, who is described as doing so. Whereas in the Puranas one reads of Jatila, simultaneous spouse of seven sages, so polyandry’s not wholly without precedent.’ I paused, and softened my learned tone. ‘But the sacred texts may not be the only place to look for an answer to our conundrum.’ I looked deep into Draupadi’s eyes. ‘Strange, my dear, are the ways of the Lord. Did you, when you were anxious about your marital prospects, pray to Heaven to intercede?’

Draupadi lowered her lashes. ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

‘Did you, by any chance, invoking Shiva, plead, ‘”Give me a husband”?’

‘I prayed to Shiva,’ Draupadi said, ‘to Jehovah, to the Virgin Mother of my adoptive parents, to the Allah of the Muslims and’ — she blushed in acknowledgement of her maternal faith — ‘to the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘Poor confused child,’ I said. ‘They have all answered your prayers.’

Once it was clear that Draupadi had brought her five husbands upon herself by her five prayers, all resistance to the multiple marriage melted.

Only Nakul had one last question: ‘What about the. . the law?’

‘The law proscribes bigamy,’ I admitted, ‘but says absolutely nothing about polyandry. You will undertake five religious marriages, which I, as a Brahmin, will conduct; the law does not oblige you to register any of the five. Prosecution, in any case, is highly unlikely: the Indian police have far too many other things to worry about. This is not an offence — if offence it is — of which they will take cognizance.’

‘And I thought I was the lawyer in the family,’ Yudhishtir said admiringly.

So the weddings were solemnized and conducted with all due ceremony, one a night for five successive nights. For the last time in my long career I was able to put to good use the instruction of my father Parashar, so that Draupadi entered each of her nuptial beds a virgin. She was not a woman whom any single man could feel he was the first to possess.

And yes, Ganapathi, I see from your frown that you have sensed the one discordant note I have so far omitted to strike. Bhim’s wife, the sylph-like sister of the monster Hidimba, left him and took with her his copper-muscled, spear-chinned son Ghatotkach.

‘My brother,’ she said sadly, ‘needs me more than you do.’

This was true: the Pandavas, under their mother, were terribly self-sufficient, with the self-obsession that sometimes accompanies self-possession. It had not been easy for her to belong; perhaps the only way to belong in that family was Draupadi’s.

It was ironic but true: one swayamvara drove out another.

And so, Ganapathi, Bhim’s wife left our story, never to return. And — have you noticed? — we still don’t know her name.

After the last of the wedding ceremonies, I took Kunti aside and thanked her. ‘You played your part well, mother of Arjun,’ I said solemnly. ‘I realize it could not have been easy for you. But it was essential that you maintained your command to share her. Draupadi Mokrasi. cannot be confined to one husband, however worthy: she needs them all.’

Kunti lowered her eyes in acknowledgement of our collusion. When she raised her head there was a fierce determination in the set of her jaw. ‘I did as you said,’ she admitted, ‘but I only knew I was right when they all arrived home. I saw then that it was the only way. The beauty of this woman would have destroyed the unity of my family.’

‘You did well, Kunti,’ I said. ‘Now she will bring strength to your sons, as she will derive strength from her husbands.’

Kunti smiled quietly and left me. I watched with grandfatherly affection as she rejoined her five sons and their common bride.

Once again, Ganapathi, I was playing my role.

94

Shishu Pal was a good Prime Minister, in his decent and well-meaning way. But he was one of those whom Fate destines to the footnotes of history.

Almost from the first day his rule seemed stamped with the label ‘interregnum’. The Karnistanis, too, saw the haze of transience around his eyes. They began their preparations soon after he had unassumingly assumed office, and seized the first tactical opportunity to make their second grab for Manimir.

But, like everyone else, the Karnistanis had underestimated Shishu Pal. He prayed from dusk till dawn, then gave the order for counter-attack. Our army had learned its lessons from the Chakra humiliation, and hit back so hard that our troops were just seven kilometres from Karnistan’s most populous city, Laslut, when another cease-fire intervened. (The story of the subcontinent’s recent wars, Ganapathi, is that of politicians shouting both ‘Fire!’ and ‘Cease!’ at the wrong times.)

Shishu Pal then sat at the conference table and meticulously gave back everything our boys had won on the battlefield.

‘Peace demands compromise,’ he murmured, as he signed away the very passes and bluffs and salients on which our best soldiers had earned their posthumous mentions in despatches. But he agonized over each square inch he returned, seeming to weigh the amount of Indian blood soaked into each clump of soil that he tossed back into Karnistan.

At last, the night that he signed the peace treaty, aware that at home the jackals were again baying, ‘Betrayal,’ but convinced that his dharma placed the preservation of life above the exaction of revenge, Shishu Pal tossed and turned his way into an eternal sleep. It was almost as if dying was the only means he had of showing the widows and cripples how intimately he suffered for their wasted sacrifice.

And so Shishu Pal passed from the nation’s front pages as unobtrusively as he had entered them. If a war had broken Dhritarashtra’s heart, a peace had broken his.

And so, too, we sat down together again in my house, the members of the Kaurava Working Committee, the collective husbands of Indian democracy, and asked ourselves a question we had hoped not to ask again so soon: ‘What do we do now?’

Someone suggested the same formula: that one of us be elected to rule as primus inter pares, just as Shishu Pal had been. But as soon as names were broached it became apparent that no one could attract even the minimal ‘no objection’ consensus which had given that good man the job that had cost him his life.

At last I spoke the words that had lain dormant in me all those years, the words I had hoped I would be able to suppress when the time came, the words I knew I was fated to speak from the moment that Gandhari the Grim had rested her sweat-soaked head upon her pillow and refused to look at her new-born baby.

‘There is only one possible solution to our dilemma,’ I said, the words emerging by themselves from my vocal chords. ‘Priya Duryodhani.’

‘A woman?’

Imagine, Ganapathi, that was all they found to say; that was the principal objection of the guardians of our nation to the forces of destiny. ‘A woman!’ they said, as if they were not all born of them.

‘Precisely,’ I replied, speaking as I was willed to speak. ‘We want a Prime Minister with certain limitations, a Prime Minister who is no more than any minister, a Prime Minister who will decorate the office, rally the support of the people at large and let us run the country. None of us can play that role as well as Priya Duryodhani can. She is easily recognizable, she is known as her father’s daughter, and she will be more presentable to foreign dignitaries than poor little Shishu Pal ever was. And if we ever decide we have had enough of her — well, she is only a woman.’

What can you expect, Ganapathi? My irrefutable eloquence carried the day. Priya Duryodhani was sworn in as the third Prime Minister of independent India. And once again I had acted as the agent of forces stronger than myself, leaving my smudgy thumbprint on those pages of history that it had been my task to turn.

95

Do you, Ganapathi, know the story of Tilottama?

Tilottama was an apsara, the most ravishing of celestial nymphs, and she was sent down to earth to perform a task even the gods found impossible — the destruction of the invincible twin sovereigns Sunda and Upasunda.

The twins were absolute monarchs and absolutely inseparable; they ruled the same kingdom, sat on the same throne, ate off the same plate and slept on the same bed; and they enjoyed a boon that decreed they could die only by each other’s hand. They were so close that this seemed an improbable prospect, but the gods knew a thing or two about men. They sent Tilottama down on her terrestrial mission, and within days — not to mention nights — she had the twins so maddened by jealousy of each other that they fought over her, fatally.

Imagine, Ganapathi: they had, in the modern phrase, everything going for them, and yet they killed each other for exclusive possession of a calculatingly desirable woman.

There are many lessons one can derive from this story, including the basic one that twins should beware of women called Tilottama, but the moral that the Pandavas took to heart from my recitation of the tale was more constructive: that when many men desire one woman they must take all possible precautions against the slightest risk of similar self-destruction. Accordingly the Five drew up elaborate schedules and procedures for the sharing of Draupadi, dividing their proprietary rights with due heed to the privileges of seniority and the inconveniences of her time of month. And they concluded with a rule as inflexible as the one that bound them to filial obedience: should any one of them interrupt Draupadi in the embrace of another, the intruder would be banished from the household for twelve months.

A remarkable rule, that, but they were a remarkable quintet, Ganapathi. Some day their lives and beliefs will be studied by bright young scholars across the country, so let us look at them now, in the early years of their adulthood, as a textbook might. A school textbook, for they personified the hopes and the limitations of each of the national institutions they served; a school textbook, with portraits drawn in clear simple lines, and accompanying text in large bold letters.

First, inevitably, would be Yudhishtir, clearly the inheritor of the Hastinapur political legacy. Maturely serious and prematurely bald, he qualified as a lawyer but made politics his only vocation, rising with steady inevitability up the party’s ranks. The fact of seniority and the assumption of authority made him extremely sure of himself, to the point, indeed, where he did not always stay on the right side of the borderline between self-confidence and smugness. Oh, he was polite, courteous to elders, truthful, honest, dutiful. But certitudes came too easily to him, doubts almost never. Like many an eldest son in India, he believed he invariably knew what was best for his juniors and expected automatically to be obeyed by them. This meant that the older he grew, the fewer were those to whom he needed to defer, and the less accommodating he became. Secure in his integrity and righteousness, he was impervious to the corruption and injustice around him; he sought to be right rather than to do right.

Turn the page of our primer, Ganapathi, and you would find a large, muscular figure in battle fatigues. Bhim embodied the physical strength without which the new nation could not have defended itself. He joined the army; to many of us, he was the army. His pureness of heart and spirit, his courage and bravery, the depth of his convictions, were at the nation’s disposal at the borders, and — in times of emergency — wherever it was needed within the country. Belying the profuse moustache whose bristles he proudly groomed, Bhim was gentle and considerate with those in his care, especially his mother and Draupadi Mokrasi. But he was as thick-skinned and unimaginative, as incapable of original initiative, as the strongest ox in a fertile field.

Our textbook would probably devote most space to the paragon of perfection, Arjun. There he would stand, straddling two pages, his shining gaze as steady as his strong legs. I thought of Arjun, with his paradoxical mixture of attributes, as the spirit of the Indian people, to which he so ably gave voice as a journalist. India could not be India without the loud, vibrant, excited babel of contending opinions that its free press expresses. Arjun, himself a man of contradictions, perfectly reflected both the diversity and the discordance of the Indian masses, whose collective heartbeat he heard and echoed. His gentleness of expression, his frequently troubled frown of reflection, mirrored the doubts and questions that were as much a part of his nature as the decisive flurries of action he undertook when circumstances generated their own certainties.

Madri’s twins Nakul and Sahadev — can one ever speak of them separately? — were destined early for the twin pillars of India’s independent governance; the administrative and diplomatic services. Nakul’s quickness and agility kept him always a step ahead of his brother. He spoke with breathtaking speed, the words tripping out as if only the act of utterance could give them stability and coherence. Nakul was made, Yudhishtir drily said, for diplomacy, since he could speak a lot without saying anything. Sahadev was both opposite and complementary: quiet, reflective, willing to let Nakul speak for him — until and unless he was sure of his own view, in which case his diffidence quietly gave way to clarity and firmness. One might have imagined that, with these attributes, it would be Nakul who would articulate the glib banalities of diplomacy and Sahadev who would confront the agonizing dilemmas of administration. But Fate, and a shrewd Public Services Commission interviewing panel, willed otherwise, and each went into the profession seemingly suited for his brother.

These, then, were the five who shared Draupadi Mokrasi, who gave her sustenance and protection, and who guaranteed their unity by the rigid rule that punished any intrusion with a year’s banishment.

It was a good rule as far as it went, but like all inflexible rules it suffered from the great disadvantage of leaving no room for exceptions. And so it happened that one day I stopped by and asked Arjun for the manuscript of a speech whose text he had been revising for me; I had to leave sooner than expected to deliver it and needed it immediately. I had no idea, of course, that Arjun had left it in the bedroom where at that very moment Yudhishtir and Draupadi were locked in connubial bliss. For a moment he weighed in the balance the certainty of the penalty against the certainty of letting me down, and made his dutiful choice. Perhaps he was, in some subconscious way, restlessly yearning for exile.

Arjun entered the bedroom quietly, not wishing to disturb his brother, and slipped the text off the bedside table unnoticed by the ecstatic couple. But when I had gone he waited for Yudhishtir to emerge and confessed he had violated their mutual undertaking.

‘Well, in that case I guess you’ll have to go,’ Yudhishtir said righteously. ‘Pity — it was going to be your turn tomorrow, since Bhim’s away.’

‘You can have my shift,’ said Arjun, without resentment. ‘Draupadi seems happy enough in your company.’

‘That’s dangerous talk,’ his elder brother said sharply. ‘In fact, I intend to rearrange everyone’s schedule to share your turn equally amongst the others, if you must know. But Arjun — watch your tongue. Remember Sunda and Upas-unda.’

‘I know.’ Arjun was instantly ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

But despite everything — and though he fully appreciated the objective necessity for the arrangement they had made and the exile it now imposed upon him — Arjun could not help wondering, as he took his leave of a tearful Draupadi, whether Yudhishtir would have been able to win Draupadi’s hand by himself

And think of Draupadi: abandoned by the man she had loved and wanted to marry, because of his unavoidable violation of a rule that itself served only to limit his access to her. It was not that the others displeased her; but Arjun was always her favourite, the reason why she was a Pandava bride at all, and now she would have to do without him altogether for a year.

It is, Draupadi Mokrasi thought as she submitted again that night to Yudhishtir’s studious caresses, a curiously unjust world.

96

Arjun embarked, on the rebound, on one of the great erotic sagas of our history. Travelling around the country to spend his exile as a roving correspondent for his paper, he restlessly sought an elusive fulfilment in the arms of a succession of remarkable women. Each dateline on the despatches he mailed or cabled back to the capital concealed a night, or a week, of passion.

In Hardwar, for instance, by the sacred Ganga, there was Ulupi, a Naga beauty who taught him underwater pleasures omitted in his adolescent swimming lessons. In Manipur, source of a story about the great indigenous school of classical dance, he found Chitrangada, a skilled danseuse who performed startling duets to his percussion instrument. At Khajuraho, from where he mused in print about the nation’s most sensuous tourist attraction, he succumbed to the dusky Yaga, who practised on him the results of her extensive study of temple sculpture. At each halt he left behind something of himself, but he grew immeasurably as well. He moved on, driven by an urge he could not describe and did not fully comprehend, knowing only that he had not yet found what he was seeking.

Despite the women, Arjun’s travels were not all pleasure. He saw the range and immensity of India and all its concerns. In rural Bengal he learned of the rage and frustration that led middle-class young intellectuals to throw bombs at lower-class old policemen — underpaid uniformed menials who were startled to find themselves branded by their betters as symbols of the injustice of an oppressive social order. He understood, in turn, the reciprocal ruth-lessness of the police, who felt closer to the proletariat than their highly educated assailants, and who beat and gouged and shot the Naxals on the principle of doing unto others before they did unto you. And then Arjun saw the tortured Naxalites languish in their cockroach-infested prison cells and did not blame them when they recanted, emerging to join commercial firms where they could dissolve their angst in the cocktails of a new conformity.

In the urban Bengal of the Maoists’ coffee-houses and second-hand bookshops and crowded theatres, Arjun met a young poet with piercing eyes and a goatee, who recited with painful intensity the refrain, ‘Calcutta, if you must exile me, blind my eyes before I go.’ Blind my eyes, Arjun understood, to the despair and the disrepair, the dirt and degradation, but also to the searing summer beauty of the gulmohar and cassia blossoms flaming insolent and tender along the dusty roadsides, to the awesome thunderclouds swallowing up the rooftops before a northwester storm, to the little boats gently bobbing on the Hooghly river at sunset against the shining steel frame of the massive Howrah Bridge. Blind my eyes to the rioters and the agitations and the human molluscs clinging to the outsides of smoke-spewing buses, but also to the kaleidoscope of brightly coloured kites leaping up at the blue sky, to the little boys playing cricket with makeshift gear in countless narrow lanes, to the compassion of students, housewives and nuns who strive to serve the city’s victims. Blind my eyes, finally, to the flimsy sheet-covered forms of the homeless sleeping under the arcades of fashionable hotels, to the resigned despair in the unblinded eyes of the woman, a small infant balanced on her hip and two ragged children trailing behind, who begged for help in a thin, melancholy wail which clung tenaciously to the air long after she had silently received Arjun’s alms and left.

Arjun left too, but each departure was a new beginning. In the foothills of the Himalayas he saw poor village women tying themselves to tree trunks in a defiant and life-saving embrace to prevent the saws of rapacious contractors cutting them down for commercial timber. In the deserts of Rajasthan he found how cheap it was to buy a woman for life at the district bazaar, and wrote savagely about his own purchase of such a girl for sixty rupees (when he told her she was free to go, she asked, ‘Where to?’). In urban Madras he marched alongside slogan-shouting Tamil demonstrators whose protests against the imposition of that alien and barbaric northern tongue masquerading as a ‘national’ language — Hindi — soon disintegrated into riots in which buildings and vehicles otherwise innocent of linguistic preference were stoned and burned in the angry flames of Dravidian cultural assertion. He saw the devastation wreaked by cyclones in the lush green lands of the Coromandel coast, and he dragged himself above the floodwaters to travel to drought- ravaged Bihar. There he walked on the parched, sun-scorched clay oven that had once been part of the fertile Gangetic plain, feeling the earth cracking and crumbling underfoot, learning the meaning of famine in the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes of mothers whose babies sucked at breasts as dry as the area’s riverbeds. Here too, in the cradle of Magadhan civilization that had ruled India more than 2000 years earlier, he watched a skeletal cow stumble and collapse by the side of a withered tree; and as he saw a village woman bend to pour the last precious drops of water from her own lota into the animal’s mouth, the thought struck him with overwhelming intensity: ‘This is my land’.

It was eye-opening, heart-rending — and exhausting. When the last sight and the last night had passed without either the event or the woman leaving an impression on him, Arjun realized he had seen and done too much. But he had to go on: the terms of exile were harsh.

It was thus a weary, jaded Arjun who arrived at the tip of the peninsula, at the last halt on his long traverse across the land, the obscure southern town of Gokarnam.

He did not, of course, know that it was to be his last halt. Arjun was looking for a young political giant-killer who was not well enough known outside the south, the man who had unseated the formidable local Tammany Hall boss, Kamsa, in his first election and had made himself something of a legend in the area since then. He was the Gokarnam Party secretary, and Arjun thought it would make an intriguing story to feature a local hero who had refused to seek national office. He could already visualize a quick, five- hundred word despatch: ‘the man who would not be king’. Then he would move on.

The town’s Kaurava Party office was a long, musty room in the rutted main street with a painted aluminium board outside proclaiming its purpose. Inside, the busiest sound was the hum of a fly amidst the dusty stillness of scattered files. A young man in white — clerk or functionary, Arjun did not know — sat beneath a black-and-red Malayala Manorama calendar idly fanning himself with a yellowing Mathrubhoomi Azhichapadippu.

‘Secretary gone out,’ he informed Arjun with pleasure. ‘Some party work he is having in near-by village. If you are wishing to go there, I will explain you how.’

Arjun was indeed wishing to go there, having nothing better to do. He soon found himself stepping off a shuddering rural bus at an enormous family-planning hoarding that dominated the centre of the village of Karink-olam. Tea drinkers at the rickety stall near the bus stop, their mundus tucked up around their knees, grinned at his attempts to communicate the object of his search in English, Hindi and the universal language of signs.

‘Krishna, party secretary? From Gokarnam?’ the chaya-kadakamn, the stall- keeper himself, finally put Arjun out of his misery. ‘You will find at Ottamthullal — that way.’

Arjun followed the pointing finger down a dusty track that led from the village centre towards, and then through, the paddy-fields that covered most of Karinkolam. He paused at the crest of the road, overwhelmed by the breathtaking simplicity of the sight. The beauty of the Kerala countryside was the beauty of the commonplace: of the green of the rice stalks and the green of the palm fronds, of the glow of the sun and the freshness of the air, of the sweat of labour and the miracle of grain. Arjun walked on past the busy figures of thozhilalis, ankle-deep in muddy water, bending over the breeze- stirred plants, and he slowed his pace occasionally for a gaggle of giggly schoolgirls or a trundling bullock-cart. He was now walking through the fields themselves, on a narrow path of earth, in places barely a footstep wide. As he picked his way gingerly over an unexpected dip in the path, the rhythmic throbbing of an unfamiliar drum floated across the paddy-fields. Clearly something was going on, a local event at which he might find someone to lead him to Krishna.

The path turned a corner and Arjun suddenly found himself facing a rudimentary stage, sheltered by palm fronds. Over a hundred people had gathered before it, and were intently watching a performance of an art form Arjun had never seen before. A dancer, his head topped by a vividly painted papier-maché crown, bells dangling from a string around his waist and tinkling at his feet, was jumping — there was no other word for it — in large, flowing steps to the rhythm of the accompaniment of three musicians. There were also, on stage with him, three expressionless men with bare chests and mundus trailing to the floor, one banging vigorously at the taut sides of a madallam, one striking a kettle-drum with the flat of his palm, the third clashing tiny cymbals in time with the crashing of the dancer’s feet. A song, incomprehensible to Arjun but unquestionably of solemn, possibly religious, significance, droned on in the background.

Arjun looked round the appreciative crowd, then selected a bespectacled man attired in a Terylene shirt, with a pen in his front pocket.

‘Excuse me,’ he asked in English, ‘but can you tell me where is. . er. . Ot-tamthullal?’

The man turned and looked at him with interest. ‘What do you mean, where is Ottamthullal?’ he asked.

‘I’m a stranger here, and I may not be pronouncing it right, but I’m looking for a place, or house, called Ottamthullal. I’m hoping to meet someone there.’

‘You have found your Ottamthullal, but it is not a place or a house. It is a dance. This dance.’ The man gestured toward the stage, from which the dancer, to loud applause, was just descending. ‘Which seems now to have ended.’

But not quite. As Arjun looked in dismay at his informant and at the applauding audience, a white-shirted figure — apparently at the urging of a section of the crowd — rose from the audience and leapt on to the platform. The crowd greeted his appearance with a thunderous roar. Even the expressionless musicians smiled briefly to acknowledge their new companion, and thumped their instruments with celebratory verve. A few young men in the audience whistled in loud excitement. Grinning unselfconsciously, the intruder pulled off his immaculate shirt, revealing a dark, gleaming and undeniably pudgy torso. He tossed the garment into the crowd and deftly caught the gaily coloured dancer’s head-dress and bells that were tossed back to him. As he tied them on, the music built up into a steady rhythm, clearly more cheerful than the dirge that had preceded it. Arjun found himself waiting to see what would happen: the happy expectancy of the crowd had infected him too.

The man on the stage stepped forward, knees apart and bent, feet pointing in opposite directions. His right foot came down in a decisive thrust; the crowd cheered. His body swerved, his feet pounding, the stage, the tempo of the music accelerating. Then he began to sing. Arjun could not understand the words, but it was a strange, droll lyric, the man’s almond eyes widening and shrinking expressively with each turn of phrase, his hands turning and flowing in gestures of mock classicism, his every movement punctuating the verse with bursts of laughter from the ground. Arjun turned in puzzlement to his informant.

‘It is very funny,’ the man in the Terylene shirt explained. ‘You see, the Ottamthullal is normally a dance that illustrates songs from our Puranas, especially the Ramayanam and the Mahabharatam. But what this man is doing is a very good parody. A very good dance, with very good lyrics written by T. Chandran, a Malayali immigrant in England. It is all about learning English manners and ways of behaviour. Very funny.’ The man chortled. ‘But, ah, of course, you do not understand Malayalam. Naturally, naturally. How foolish of me. But wait — if you listen carefully, you will find it is not so difficult, after all.’

Arjun strained dutifully to catch the words chanted by the dancer, and by many members of the crowd in ragged unison, but they seemed to have little in common with the languages of the north that Arjun knew. One refrain stuck tantalizingly in his ear:

Thottathin ellam ‘Thank you, thank you’,

Ottu mushinyal ‘Sorry, sorry’. .

He gave up, and concentrated on the dance. The man on the stage, his body glistening with sweat, was executing ever more vigorous steps. His feet pounding, his trunk swaying, his hands and legs flailing the air, bells ringing furiously with each movement, the dancer twisted and turned, leapt and flew, rose and fell.

There was neither beauty nor elegance in the dance. Its cadences, its vigour, were wholly foreign to Arjun’s experience. Yet Arjun felt an involuntary stirring within him, a quickening of his spirit in response to the movements of this strange, magical man. The drums throbbed, and the dancer strode and jumped and sang, his arms and legs moving to the tempo of the rhythm of life. Arjun was suddenly seized by the sense that everything he had seen around him in Kerala that day was embodied in this man: the surge of the sea at the shore, the swaying of the palm trees, the rippling green of the sun-drenched paddy- fields, the laughter of the children running in the village street. The dancer’s energy flowed into him: Arjun felt his earlier satiety and tiredness lifting.

On stage, the dancer’s movements accelerated in a fast, flowing piston- burst of motion till, with an enormous crescendo that seemed to shake the platform, he swivelled, back arching, to a feet-scudding stop. The audience rose to its feet and applauded, cheering him loudly. Grinning in open delight, the dancer waved at them and stepped off the stage.

‘How did you like it?’

‘Very much,’ Arjun answered truthfully. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. Is that man your village Ottamthullal expert?’

‘Not at all,’ the man in the Terylene shirt replied. ‘He is not even from here. In fact, he is the local M L A, and the Kaurava Party secretary for the taluk. His name is D. Krishna Parthasarathi.’

And Arjun knew that he had at last come to the end of his search.

97

Call me Krishna.’ The party secretary smiled. ‘Everyone does. Dwarakaveetile Krishnankutty Parthasarathi Menon is a bit of a mouthful even in these parts.’

‘Thanks, Krishna. I’m Arjun.’

Krishna smiled again as he acknowledged the easy assumption of familiarity. He was dark, of medium height and build, with long, slightly curly hair and brilliant white teeth which shone like pearls against the velvet of his skin whenever he smiled, which was often. He smiled at everyone he met as he walked with Arjun to the bus-stop, picking up one fold of his spotless white mundu to facilitate his stride. The villagers all seemed to know him, and he was greeted affectionately by young and old, male and female alike — a joyous, radiant being with God’s own mischief in his eyes.

The jolting bus ride back to Gokarnam was the beginning of a friendship that would transcend time, space and distance, and give meaning and purpose to Arjun’s life.

Krishna was, despite his relative youth, a political veteran. He had entered politics earlier than anyone else in the Kaurava Party: his parents, both freedom fighters, were in jail when he was born, the youngest and decidedly the most vocal prisoner of the Raj. With his parents continuing active electoral careers, Krishna’s largely unsupervised childhood had given him a reputation both for mischievous pranks and political precocity. The youngster’s playgrounds were often the maidans of party rallies; he was reading Gangaji’s abstruse autobiography when his classmates were coping with comics; and he was arguing with adults when he ought to have been speaking to them only when spoken to.

His political opportunities came correspondingly early. He was a popular and successful election campaigner for the party, with almost no competition for the women’s vote. From an early age Krishna had the rare talent of being able to talk to people at their own level. He was equally at home teasing the milkmaids while they bathed in the river as when debating the theory of permanent revolution with the local Mau-Maoists. He would disarm them all with his laughing good nature, then resolve the point at issue through the utterance of a perception so startling in its clarity and simplicity that it made all further argument otiose. And he would invariably get his way with members of either group.

This was not surprising, for the most striking thing about Krishna was his joyousness. He was always relaxed, always laughing, full of innocent mischief that never quite obscured his deep, instinctual wisdom. The wisdom was always apparent, despite the laughter, and it was not a wisdom acquired through learning or even through experience, but something that arose from deep within himself, as if from the very earth he stood on. Yet Krishna wore his wisdom lightly: he expressed it with a simplicity so profound that it did not seem to recognize the depths from which it sprang.

Arjun found himself entranced. In Krishna he found qualities he had never seen in any man nor sought in any woman. He was irresistibly drawn to Krishna’s almost magical combination of self-possession and extroversion, mischief arid maturity, joy and judgement, and his rare gift of the common touch. Days after he should have filed his story and left, Arjun stayed on at Gokarnam as Krishna’s guest and disciple.

He followed the Gokarnam Party secretary on his daily round of meetings and speeches; watched him squat on his haunches in a paddy-field with a stalk between his teeth, talking about irrigation to a calloused peasant; helped him hide the davanis of bathing milkmaids in the bushes by the river. And at night after a late meeting or a working dinner, Arjun sat alone in the swift-falling darkness and surrendered himself to the haunting strains of Krishna’s flute floating across to him on the still night air. Each pure clear note on that magical instrument seemed marinaded in mystical meaning, yet when Arjun first tried to express his admiration, Krishna laughingly dismissed the topic. And Arjun understood that even the highest praise would only diminish what the music of that flute meant to his friend.

Krishna’s words, like his music, were those of a soul at peace on this earth. But Arjun learned that not all had been tranquil in his friend’s life. Stories he heard suggested that when Krishna was young, jealous relatives — led by his maternal uncle, the dread patriarch in Kerala’s matrilineal marumakattayam system — had coveted his inheritance and sought to destroy him. But Krishna’s surging vitality had triumphed, and in his first election Krishna had toppled his own uncle, the formidable local party boss, Kamsa. Yet as a popular hero and a secure Member of the Legislative Assembly, Krishna had been too satisfied with his life in Gokarnam to seek a place in the national Parliament. As someone who knew national politics too well, Arjun found this appalling.

‘You’ve got to let me persuade you,’ he told his friend, ‘that the country needs people like you in the mainstream of national politics.’

‘I’m quite happy with my local river, thanks,’ Krishna laughed. ‘If you were to stay a little longer here, see my life, my place in the lives of the people, you would understand.’

‘But what a waste,’ Arjun expostulated, warming to his theme and his friend. ‘You could find a place in the hearts of the entire country, not just one part of it.’

‘I should quote you to Radha,’ Krishna said. ‘You see, Arjun, I’m very content with the part I have.’

‘Are you married?’ Arjun asked gauchely.

‘No,’ Krishna replied, flashing those white teeth of his, ‘but my wife is.’

Arjun deeply pondered that remark. Krishna, though always warm and candid, was a master of the art of being elliptical without sounding evasive.

Yet his friend’s ellipses never aroused the slightest doubt or anxiety in Arjun. Krishna must have had good reasons; Krishna had to be right. True, he avoided making a national commitment; but so what? His very being was a celebration of life; he could not possibly be accused of evading its challenges. Krishna could, after all, have lived on his inheritance, enjoying prestige and status without effort, but he had entered the lists and toppled Kamsa. He would swim out of his chosen backwater when he considered it necessary, and not before.

Arjun found his article impossible to write. It was intended to be simple and short, but nothing about Krishna could be either.

98

For a man so completely in tune with India’s ancient harmonies, Krishna was startlingly liberal.

‘Who is that stunning girl?’ Arjun asked as they strolled outside his host’s parental home one evening, past a group of laughing collegians who smiled and waved and called out to Krishna.

‘Which one?’ Krishna looked at him shrewdly. ‘There were seven girls in that group, unless my buttermilk had fermented more than I realized.’

‘I only noticed one,’ Arjun replied. ‘It was as if the other six were her maids in a traditional painting, gathered to do her honour. The fair girl in red, with music in her voice and sunrise in her hair.’

Krishna’s laugh bellowed across the road. ‘I hadn’t heard the music or been blinded by the sunrise, but there was only one girl in red,’ he chuckled. ‘My sister Subhadra.’

Arjun stopped still, the shock of recognition coursing through him. Of course! That was what had caught his eye — the startling similarity of the fair girl to his dark friend. He had noticed it subconsciously as they approached the girls and as they walked past, but he would not have been able to define what it was about the girl that so captivated him. Now he knew. Despite the astonishing difference of colour — not so uncommon in Kerala families — the girl’s every gesture, every turn of the head or movement of the hands, was Krishna’s. He found himself looking back at her, and reddened. ‘Your sister! I say — I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ Krishna laughed. ‘I don’t often find myself in this position. Now if it was one of the other six. . So you like the look of Subhadra, do you?’

‘God, yes,’ said Arjun fervently. He looked at the merry face before him and recalled its smiling female version. ‘I’d want to woo her immediately, if you’d only tell me how.’

‘I thought you said you were married.’

‘Yes and no. I mean, I’m married but not all the time,’ Arjun assured him hastily. ‘Four fifths of me is still available, and I’d like to offer that to Subhadra. If you will allow me.’

‘Allow you? My dear Arjun, what age are you living in? I do not dictate to Subhadra whom she should allow to woo her. Besides, she is somewhat difficult to woo. Like many of these modern girls, she thinks herself too good for a mere man, but unlike most, she won’t let any man get close enough to prove otherwise.’

‘Then tell me, Krishna, what should I do? How can I seek to win her?’

‘You are one for medieval chivalric conventions, aren’t you? Subhadra has always said she’d choose her own husband, but from what I’ve seen of her I doubt very much she’d be able to judge what was for her own good. My advice would be quite simply to give her no choice. Be Valentino, not Valentine. Kidnap her. Take her away on a white charger!’

‘You mean — elope?’

‘You make it sound so prosaic, Arjun,’ Krishna sighed in eye-twinkling resignation. ‘But yes, I suppose I do mean elope. Except that if eloping involves the consent of both parties, abduction might be a lot more effective.’

Startled, Ganapathi? Not quite the way for a good Indian elder brother to behave, eh? If you thought that, I suppose you’d be right, but this was just one more instance of Krishna’s innocently instinctual amorality. He lived by rules which originated in an ancient and ineffable source, a source that transcended tradition. Unlike the rest of us, even unlike Arjun, Krishna found his basic truth within himself. No conventional code could confine the joyous surging force of vitality, of essential life, that he embodied.

And so the plans were laid; Arjun borrowed a white Ambassador car to serve as his charger, and lay in wait after dark along the route Subhadra used on her way back from her evening classical-music lessons.

A little later than expected, he saw her emerge from a building across the road with a small group of fellow students. They stood in a little knot on the front steps, but in a moment the knot unravelled and the girls strolled away in different directions.

Subhadra was walking alone.

Arjun felt the palpitations in his chest as he turned the key. The car did not start. His heart was beating more vigorously than the motor.

He turned the key again, cursing. The girls were disappearing one by one down several streets.

The Ambassador car is, of course, Ganapathi, the classic symbol of India’s post-Independence industrial development. Outdated even when new, inefficient and clumsy, wasteful of steel and petrol, overpriced and overweight, with a steering mechanism like an ox cart’s and a frame like a tank’s, the Ambassador has dominated India’s routes since Dhritarashtra’s ascent to power, protected and patronized by our nationalists in the name of self-reliance. Foreign visitors have never ceased to be amazed that this graceless contraption of quite spectacular ugliness enjoyed two-year waiting lists with all the dealers. What they don’t realize is that if they had to drive on Indian roads in Indian traffic conditions, they would prefer Ambassadors too.

Arjun sighed, then opened the boot and pulled out one more evidence of the Ambassador’s appropriateness to Indian conditions — the crank. He took the L-shaped iron bar to the front of the vehicle, inserted it and turned it vigorously. The engine cranked, wheezed and spluttered into life. Arjun was back in the running.

He returned to the driver’s seat and anxiously scanned the road. The girls had all disappeared. But he was fairly sure he knew which road Subhadra would take to walk home. Amidst the blaring of offended horns, he eased his car into the traffic.

That was it — the turning — and surely that was her, just beyond the last flickering street-lamp? Arjun began to turn, then realized it was a one-way street. This is not a consideration that always impedes Indian drivers, but in this case the entrance to the street was blocked by an enormous lorry prevented from heading the right way by a homesick cow yoked to an unattended cart. The impasse appeared likely to last: certainly the truck driver had resigned himself to the situation, for he had placed his prayer-mat on the bonnet and had begun performing his namaz. Arjun drove on. He would try the next street.

This time the turn was easier to execute. He proceeded slowly, looking for the first left turn that would bring him back to the street on which he had spotted Subhadra.

There wasn’t one.

Arjun felt the sweat on his palms and the frustration higher up. He had to get her! He turned right, hoping to find two lefts later. The roads all seemed to curve away at impossible angles from the direction in which he wanted to go. Whenever he found a left, it seemed to be succeeded by a street with a no-entry sign or a cul-de-sac. He turned; he swerved; he reversed down oneway streets; he retraced his route and did the opposite of what he had done before. Finally, dizzied by seventeen left turns and thirteen unintended rights, he emerged on a quiet unlit street that seemed vaguely familiar. As familiar, in fact, as the skirted figure walking hip-swayingly ahead into the shadows.

Subhadra!

Amidst the darkness and the shadows of confusion in his own mind there shone a clear beam of determination. He was at last going to be able to do what he had set out to do.

He swung the car around and accelerated past the girl. The street was deserted; its lamps, which blinked half-heartedly at the best of times, had given up the attempt and were completely extinguished. He drew up at the edge of the pavement and waited.

The footsteps approached, the soft flapping of leather chappals accompanied by the light tinkle of payals at her ankles. Arjun’s heart thudded in unbearable anticipation.

As the girl neared the car, Arjun flung open the door, grasped her by the waist and, with one hand over her mouth to prevent a scream, pulled her on to the back seat.

His victim gave a startled gasp and then began to fight, kicking, lashing at him. Arjun realized there were limits to the effectiveness of the abduction technique as a means of promoting his cause.

‘Don’t,’ he begged. ‘I will not harm you. I do this out of love! I desire you as the bee desires the flower, as the minute desires the hour, as the sannyasi desires moksha!’ The girl’s resistance seemed to subside with his protestations. Arjun followed his words with a flurry of kisses that effectively silenced all opposition.

She was responding! As Arjun used his one free hand — the other still prudently covered the girl’s mouth — to caress his companion, he found his ardour reciprocated. The hands that had been attempting a moment earlier to scratch and hit him now stroked their ravisher. The girl’s body arched, and her fingers fumbled in the dark for his malehood.

Arjun was lost. He freed himself, raised his companion’s skirt, and expended an hour of anxiety, anticipation and hope in a minute’s frenetic release.

‘I love you, Subhadra,’ he breathed afterwards, dropping his head on to the gentle swell of her breast.

His partner laughed, a harsh, guttural sound. ‘Gosh, you really were in a hurry, weren’t you? I’ve never done it this way before.’

The voice was coarse, and Arjun, realization pouring on him like iced water on a cold morning, reached up to switch on the car light.

That’ll be forty rupees,’ said a rouged and painted woman, blinking into his face. ‘And my name isn’t Subhadra, it’s Kameswari.’

She swung thick legs off the back seat. ‘Though you can call me Subhadra if you like, sweetie.’ She shook her head. ‘How impatient you young boys are! Couldn’t you have waited to find a room in a hotel?’

99

Crass, Ganapathi? Of course it was. But this is one memoir which will not conceal the crassness of its heroes. No more than it will be embarrassed by their greatness.

The next morning Krishna gently mocked the shame-faced Arjun. ‘I must take lessons from you,’ he laughed. ‘What subtlety of technique! Your victim didn’t even realize she’d been abducted!’

‘Watch me next time,’ said Arjun defiantly. And indeed, when Subhadra was returning one morning from the temple, with the sun’s rays weaving delicate patterns of light and shade in her hair (and doing so brightly enough to leave no doubt as to her identity), Arjun swooped down and swept her, in every sense, off her feet.

The elders of Gokarnam were furious, and rose with inflamed faces to demand Arjun’s arrest. It was Krishna who calmed them down by pointing out to his father Vasudevan: ‘Subhadra couldn’t have found herself a better husband, and she might easily — you know how women are — have done a lot worse. We had decided long ago we weren’t going to subject my sister to the humiliation of being inspected like a chicken at a market by a succession of prospective fathers-in-law, who would base their final decision on the size of the dowry we could offer them to take her off our hands. In the circumstances, isn’t what Arjun has done the best thing that could have happened, from our own point of view?’

‘And what about Subhadra’s?’

‘Does any woman of spirit allow herself to be abducted without at least some degree of acquiescence? Had she disliked Arjun, she would have made his life so miserable he would have returned her to us in hours. Let us call them back, and we shall see how happy Subhadra is.’

They did, and she was. A lavish wedding was quickly arranged, and Arjun spent the remainder of his exile in Gokarnam enjoying his honeymoon and the companionship of Krishna. When it was time for him to return to Delhi, he made one last appeal to his new friend.

‘Come back with me, and let me introduce you to the party elders,’ he said. ‘Your future is in Delhi.’

‘No, Arjun. I’m sorry, I can’t. Not now, not yet. But I promise to come and visit you before long, and to give you my advice whenever you need it.’ Krishna placed his hands on Arjun’s firm shoulders, and looked intently into his eyes. ‘It is your future that beckons in Delhi, and you must go to it. As for myself, I shall be happy to remain behind the scenes here in Gokarnam and guide you when I can.’

Wise guidance from a detached distance: that was all that Krishna would offer Arjun, and India. It was maddeningly inadequate, yet it seemed impossible to change his mind. Just as well, perhaps, Arjun thought: it might have been worse to try to confine this gloriously free spirit in the concrete chrysalis of the capital.

And so the friends parted, and Arjun returned home with Subhadra. How would she be welcomed into the home from which he had been exiled, twelve long months earlier? Despite himself, Arjun worried about this. He had, quite simply, lied to Draupadi, with an inland letter-card telling her he was bringing her a new maid. He knew she would not believe him, and it almost did not matter that she would not. What he wanted was for the lie to hold until the women met, when he knew it would all resolve itself, one way or another.

Do not rush to condemn our bigamist hero, Ganapathi. He was faithful to Draupadi in his fashion, but fidelity was not the touchstone of their relationship. Arjun was bound to Draupadi by the very essence of their complementary natures, by the inexorabilities of destiny, par la force des chases. His relationship with Subhadra was of a totally different texture, one of lightness and joy; within it he had a sense of responsibility for his choice and for his love, an awareness that the bonds were willed by him and not by events over which he had no control. He needed her, whereas he and Draupadi responded to a need that was greater than themselves.

After anxiety, bathos. When she had touched Kunti’s feet and been embraced in welcome by her mother-in-law, Subhadra turned to Draupadi Mok-rasi.

‘I’ve really been looking forward to meeting you,’ she said, the sincerity glowing in her eyes. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’

‘I wish I could say the same,’ Draupadi replied.

The situation was, in a word, fraught. The two women eyed each other for a moment in — Ganapathi, I cannot resist the phrase — a pregnant silence. Then, almost simultaneously, they both rushed to the kitchen sink and were sick.

Subhadra’s son Abhimanyu and Yudhishtir’s heir Prativindhya were born less than nine months later. And from the moment their foreheads met painfully over the kitchen sink, the two women became the best of friends. It was, in its own way, only natural; for they shared more, Ganapathi, than the closest of sisters ever could.

And it was no accident, after all, that Sunda and Upasunda had been men. It would have taken the gods a good deal more than a male Tilottama to break the elemental bonds of sisterhood.